Building with Purpose: How I Helped LGF Refocus Their Website to Better Serve Their Manchester Community

The Lesbian and Gay Foundation (LGF), based on Manchester’s historic Canal Street, is a charity focused on supporting the LGBTQ+ community through health, education, advocacy, and inclusion. Their website was a key part of how they engaged supporters, provided resources, and attracted funding.

Rather than approaching the redesign as a fixed brief, I helped shape it into a partnership-led, GDS-style delivery—starting with true discovery, driven by user needs, data, and commercial alignment.

The Challenge

LGF had strong site engagement metrics—but most of their traffic came from outside the UK, especially from the United States. While impressive at face value, this traffic was misaligned with their funding model, which was focused on local initiatives and UK-based outcomes. This disconnect made it harder to demonstrate impact to sponsors and stakeholders.

They needed more than a visual refresh. They needed a site that delivered the right traffic, told their local story, and supported community impact through relevant, measurable engagement.

The Strategy

I was involved from the pitch stage and helped steer the process away from “solution first” into a phased, user-centred partnership. Using GDS (Government Digital Service) principles, we broke the project into manageable stages.

During discovery, we gathered real insights—not just what LGF thought they needed, but what their users were doing, and where their engagement was coming from. By analysing the data, we surfaced a key insight: global reach was impressive, but local impact mattered more. From this, we developed a content strategy focused on locality, sponsorship relevance, and measurable outcomes.

Key actions included:

• Led a full discovery process, including workshops and data analysis

• Challenged metrics that looked good on the surface but had little funding impact

• Defined new KPIs around relevant traffic, local engagement, and conversion

• Designed a site that brought local content to the forefront

• Integrated a live social media stream to showcase community activity in real time

• Launched an MVP that prioritised core content and immediate business needs

• Built out additional features and pages iteratively, based on priority and feedback

The Results

• Launched a redesigned, community-focused site built around real user data and local goals

• Increased relevant UK traffic and reduced reliance on vanity metrics

• Delivered an MVP quickly, with features added over time as business needs evolved

• Integrated social feeds and community storytelling to boost visibility and engagement

• Enabled LGF to better demonstrate local impact to sponsors and funding bodies

Conclusion

This was more than a site redesign. It was a strategic realignment of how LGF communicated its value to its most important audiences—its local community and its sponsors. If you’re working with limited resources but need big impact, I can help shape and deliver a digital strategy that fits.

Let’s talk about building digital products that focus on what really matters.

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